Does Your Website Drive Traffic to Your Local Business?
Effective small business websites needs to do lots more than just look good. So many small businesses hire a web designer to create a website with an attractive banner and good color combinations. That's all wrong. Research shows that ugly websites can be as effective as attractive websites. It isn't about how the business website looks. It's about whether it does it's job.
Three Important Functions
Small business websites have 3 important functions. If you get these three things right, your website will be an effective marketing tool.
Direct Traffic.
Connect with the Visitor.
Build an Email List.
Your website's home page is your prime opportunity to direct visitor traffic. One mistake that a lot of businesses make is trying to cram as much information as possible into the home page of their site. This is a sure-fire way to overwhelm any new visitors, and in many cases they will just click away and keep looking.
Instead, use the home page to grab the visitor’s attention and help them find the right page on the site for whatever information they’re looking for. Think of it as a sort of “directory” for the rest of the site. You want people to be able to find what they want within 5 seconds of landing on your website if at all possible.
Local business websites need clear navigation bars and internal context links to help visitors move around the website easily. Repeat important links and scatter them around the page. Give visitors several opportunities to follow important links.
Try to look at your website from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know your business and may not even know what you offer. If you look at it from the perspective of someone who already knows everything there is to know about your business, it makes it much harder to optimize for your visitors.
Connect With Your Website Visitor.
In order to connect with visitors, small business websites need to be addressed directly to their ideal customers. An effective way to do that is to create a customer “avatar” that you can use as a model for your typical customer.
Create a fictional customer who has most of the traits of your typical client. Give them a name, consider their age, their sex, what kind of knowledge they have about your product, their income, how many kids they have, etc. The more complete this avatar is, the better.
Then, whenever you are writing something for your customers, whether your website, an email, an article or any number of other types of content, write it as though you’re addressing that fictional customer directly. This can really help to filter out the stuff that’s either unnecessary or confusing and get right to the point you want to make.
Writing for your fictional customer also helps that customer feel connected with you and your business, and we know that emotions and feelings are key to sales.
Build an Email List
As far as personal connection and

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